Lord of the Rings has always had a cachet, a multi-billion dollar franchise, winning 17 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s much-beloved books. Without Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies, we’d likely not have the Game of Thrones show on TV, HBO’s solution to their quest for something LOTR-ish that they could spin into a big budget TV epic. It worked out for HBO, so the Tolkien estate decided to see if anybody wanted to try and bottle lightning a second time, offering TV rights to the whole of Tolkien’s imaginarium, for upwards of $200 million. HBO, already
… That was the theory anyway: Spend the autumn doing things like getting the website up and running, adding content, lining up posts, building the portfolios and maybe get a few small gigs in the calendar. That seems sensible, right? As opposed to quitting your job two months early, with nothing in place except a business plan, some design work and a desperate need to change the focus of my working life. That would just be insanity! Well, maybe not. Things might be accelerating considerably faster than expected, and a lot earlier than expected, but it’s also much more exciting
